Abstract

Martin Buber wrote his 1904 dissertation on Nicholas of Cusa, but the relationship between the two has been little studied. This article focuses on four ways in which Buber appropriated Cusa’s ideas. (1) Cusa’s theory of participation argues for the absolute worth of the individual, foreshadowing Buber’s ethics of actualization. (2) Buber takes Cusa’s model of how one may know God as other through “learned ignorance” and applies it to how one may know and adequately respond to beings as others in his distinction between “I-Thou” and “I-It” relations. (3) Buber employs Cusa’s term “coincidence of opposites” to describe what happens in dialogue. Seeing the coincidence of opposites moves subjects to adopt intersubjective perspectives and give up unhealthy relations of conflict. (4) Buber’s 1938 criticism of Cusa for maintaining that selves evolve in isolation illuminates Buber’s creation of his own dialogic philosophy.